For such a creative and progressive place the internet has an awful lot of blood on its hands. If we are to believe the popular music press the internet has so far destroyed the album, the guitar band and indeed the music industry as a whole.
I am Internet, destroyer of worlds.

But amidst the din of recycled and regurgitated whinging there is one question lying quietly dormant, cocooned in the chrysalis of a tale formed in the early days of social media. It is a question almost as old as this year’s Song Of The Year Grammy winner Lorde.
“Who will be the first act launched to a classic level of recognisable superstardom solely via the internet?”
There have been many pretenders to this throne but all have sooner or later been outed as products of old industry promotional tactics thinly veiled as democratic viral phenomena.

I mention Lorde not only to appear topical but because with the release of her debut single “Royals” last year the New Zealand singer-songwriter prompted a lot of industry pundits to drop their cynicism and admit that any song able to garner such mind-boggling viewing figures with a fully-clothed and seemingly gimmickless youtube video featuring an unknown adolescent with no famous relatives must surely mean that Web 2.0 had finally come good on its promises.

Of course, it’s never as simple as that. It’s no secret that Lorde’s been on a Universal contract since she was fourteen and, though one could argue major labels have forgotten how to shift units in the digital world, they still know how to massage youtube algorithms. The interesting part isn’t in the Hows and Whats and Whether-Or-Nots, but in the very familiarity of the discussion…

One of the most persistent myths of the digital age is that the internet is here to help new musicians become rich and famous on their own terms – that it’s never been easier for independent bands to MAKE IT; that social media is opening up the doors to people who previously found themselves closed out.

But this is a pretty two-dimensional way of looking at the digital landscape – virtual keys to virtual gateways – I can’t work out if it’s closer to sci-fi or fantasy. The emails I receive from young bands throwing their demos about still use old fashioned phrases like “reaching the next level” and “breaking through” as though we were all trudging along in an 8bit platform beat-em-up.

Like it or not, we are no longer living a linear narrative (or at least our online avatars aren’t), we live in the age of the network. Networks explode outwards in all directions.
We’re drowning in the biggest Venn diagram anyone’s ever seen.

The little bit of the web devoted to the plight of needy musicians does not exist to help fill the world indiscriminately with their/our music. No one is ever going to see a pop-up box in their browser that says “Congratulations, the world wide web has selected your band to be the next U2, click here to download your leather trousers and helicopter keys.”

It can, however, help us to pretend. And that’s what Rock & Roll has always been about: Pretending. I don’t mean “pretend to be successful” by buying facebook likes and fake youtube views, or “pretending to be hip” by having white slanting Coolvetica text with forward slashes superimposed over greyscale images of the band looking at their shoes. I’m talking about pretending for pretending’s sake. Fantasy. Escapism. This is why most people want rock bands to exist at all, this is the niche that most musicians are required to fill. Sometimes we want social commentary, sometimes we want a call to arms but most of the time we just want a break from our everyday lives. Every successful band has incorporated a certain theatricality, every one of them has been in some way larger than life. It is the pretending that is important, not the pretender.

True, historically those without label backing were denied access to essential distribution networks (and thus any hope of getting their music heard by anyone outside their immediate vicinity) and that is a huge factor separating pop superstars from underground hopefuls. I’d argue, however, that the biggest difference between the winners and losers in this instance is that the latter were also denied access to that great big dressing up box enjoyed by generations of our favourite entertainers. Major label artists looked like they inhabited a different world, not just in the way they dressed and carried themselves, but in the way they were contextualized by the media, the way they were projected into the public consciousness. It was theatre.

This is where the internet helps – not in leveling the walls of distribution, but in bringing closer the canvases and collaborators. We can spin our own story, fix ourselves in post, fashion our personal contexts and sculpt the plinths on which we prop our art. In a virtual terrain where nothing is solid, magic and make-believe are within the grasp of us all. And though no amount of wishful conjuring will make an audience materialise out of nowhere, it is now within the power of all artists to project versions of themselves that transcend the pernicious realities afforded them by the everyday.

But, to judge from many current bands’ online presence, it seems all that’s left in the dressing up box is a bunch of cheap “rock star” costumes.

Really, why pretend to be Bono when you could pretend to be ANYTHING? Johnny Cash hadn’t spent any time behind bars when he wrote Folsom Prison Blues but I enjoy his jailbird act nonetheless. Similarly I can believe in Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust glam rock fairytale, no problem at all. Or Sun Ra’s space jazz for that matter. I’d happily warm my hands over a burning bin with the faux hobos (fobos?) of Dexy’s Midnight Runners. I might even be persuaded to stand and deliver for Adam Ant. I will not, however, worship at the feet of some sulky indie band shivering in a car park staring aggressively into different bits of the middle distance for no reason. There’s just no story in it.

The great disappointment of Web 2.0 (or whatever version of the internet musicians are currently spamming us in) is not that it has failed to give talented and deserving artists their big break, but that it has repeatedly exhibited the pitiful limits of so many artistic visions, like some great sprawling imagination graveyard.

The new crop of bands currently snuffling around facebook harvesting Likes and email addresses have a simple choice: They can either broadcast their ordinariness or they can broadcast their uniqueness. They don’t need to be entirely original (indeed it often helps if there is something familiar to grab onto) but every audience expects at least a grain of raw inspiration accompanied by a suggestion of flair.

New bands no longer develop secretly behind locked doors, overheard by a handful of heroic neighbours. They grow up in public, wielding the same arsenal of sophisticated promotional tools as their more established/experienced peers. They don’t have to invade our twitter feeds and invite us to their facebook events – they probably shouldn’t – but there’s no stopping them. After all, one’s early demos sound pretty phenomenal when viewed through the prism of blind ego. But if you decide to put yourself on a public stage (be it real or digital) then you’d better do it in costume. Actors don’t just wear make-up for dramatic effect, they do it to prevent their features getting washed out by the bright lights. Virtual spaces have their own kind of illumination: just as uncompromising, just as cruel.

It takes a lot of artifice to make someone look normal when they’re standing that far away. It takes even more artifice to make someone look interesting.

“Home is made for coming from, for dreams of going to, Which with any luck will never come true…“
– “Wand’rin Star” byLerner and Loewefrom the musical “Paint Your Wagon” 1951 (film version 1969)

At the beginning of this year I decided I would make a concerted effort to see more of the world.
I already do a lot of traveling but that’s generally in the back of the Bedlam Six van – the only things we tend to see on our trips are venues, hotels and motorway service stations. It’s a little bubble of placelessness.

I’ve been on call for a long time, never wanting to book a holiday or definitively RSVP to a wedding/birthday invitation for fear of missing out on a decent gig. When you’re an independent musician (or as some people still insist on saying: “unsigned”) it’s easy to fall into a trap of feeling pressured into accepting every little thing that comes along, never risking a refusal, deeming all incoming offers as potential golden opportunities to perform in front of “the right people” – those elusive dream-peddlers who’ll give you one Happily-Ever-After in exchange for a few drops of Youthful Naïveté.

But that way madness lies. Since when has art been about waiting for someone else to give you directions? Or, worse still, auditioning to be a piece in someone else’s puzzle? When art fits neatly that’s often a pretty good indication that it isn’t particularly good art (I’ve found this philosophy to be very comforting in my leaner times).

One of the most fashionable subjects for music-orientated articles and industry panels these days is Sustainability. Specifically “How to create/maintain a sustainable career in music”.

There’s loads of advice out there: from what sync agencies and collections societies to sign up with, to contract templates, to copyright tips, to what grants to apply for and how to fill out the relevant forms… the list goes on. But that stuff is all about finding the money. Sustainability is different. Sustainability is not about monetizing everything, it’s about standing back and assessing the entire operation. I would argue that to achieve real sustainability in the creative sector, you need five things (in addition to the desirable material/skills):

a good network

morale that tends towards up rather than down

a steady income (even if it’s very small)

robust health

options

They may not all come at once but there certainly needs to be a workable rotation. By “steady income” I mean one that has a relatively predictable pattern (my income, for example, is dreadful in December/January but fairly decent in April/May – so I know when I must tighten my belt and when I can indulge in the odd ice cream). The network consists of your peers both inside and outside of artistic circles (“support” would be another word for it). I include “options” at the end because sometimes doing what you love as a job can lead to hating what you love – if you don’t have something else in your life then you can run the risk of painting yourself into a pretty grim existential corner.

On Sunday 14th July Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich sparked a debate on Twitter by saying Spotify is bad for new artists. The next morning the choicer tweets were reported in the mainstream press with Yorke once again cast in the role of indie messiah. Tuesday then brought allegations of hypocrisy from both the old guard and the bright young things. Meanwhile the rest of the music world scratched their heads and said “didn’t we have the big Spotify royalties argument years ago? Is this still a thing?”

But the interesting thing is not the subject of the debate but the scale of the backlash. It seems as though everyone is coming down on one side or the other, arguing about the pros and cons of streaming, throwing dubiously interpreted figures at one another, long term statistics versus short term, predicted growth etc etc… Suddenly everyone seems rather impassioned.

But what’s the real story here? I don’t think it’s about artists getting an unfair cut of song revenue (how could that be a story? It’s the way the music industry has been run ever since it began – hardly a scoop). It is also not about Spotify’s opaque finances, or about major labels being influential shareholders in what began as a seemingly hip and radical new company. Nor is it about the man who popularised the Pay-What-You-Want model suddenly whining about not making enough money.

I wonder if the story is Fear. The fear that we put our faith in something that might turn out to disappoint us, that a promised long-sought harmony between art and industry may have been botched again. Or even worse, that we may have actually managed to encourage a situation in which the pay-per-play model (previously viewed as a sort of would-be-saviour for the modern music market) somehow only benefits the likes of Universal. Has the clever little pig who built his house out of bricks discovered he’s locked the wolf in with him?

But the Big Bad Wolf in this instance is not the major labels or Spotify. It is our continued and unfounded expectation that one single model, one easy to swallow pill, could simplify a business that has over the last fifteen years become very very complicated indeed.

Whether or not the Spotify allegations are true is immaterial (plenty of artists try to spark controversial or topical debates when they’ve got a new album to plug – ever noticed Morrisey’s racist outbursts tend to be synchronised with his touring schedule?). Here the argument itself is the issue. It is indicative of a wholly anachronistic (but deeply entrenched) way of thinking, one that is rife among artists and management alike – put basically: there is currently a problem and one day there will be a solution and things will finally go back to being the way they were.

Yes, I agree with Yorke and Godrich that Spotify fills the coffers of shareholders rather than artists and I lament the company’s perceived shift from great leveller to great dictator. But what saddens me most isn’t the thought of a company being more interested in increasing its profits than helping poets, it’s that so few of us can resist this foolish quest for the Philosopher’s Stone. Why do we insist on ramming 20th Century pegs into 21st Century holes? Do we really think the future is going to be one size fits all?

The internet put an end to the idea that progress must always be a linear narrative. Rather than “This begat That” we now face a formidable tangle of options hissing at us like so many heads of the Hydra. And yet we still cherish a Buck Rogers view of the future where new things are the same as old things but a bit shinier. This is no longer a simple tale of ever-renewing formats, recited like some kind of technological nursery rhyme: sheet music was replaced by 78s that were replaced by 45s that were replaced by CDs that were replaced by mp3s that were replaced by streams that were replaced by sonic enemas that were replaced by spinal jukeboxes that were replaced by brain radios… NO.

So aside from the wails of “Not fair! Not fair!” and the “how do we make the new Dark Dide Of The Moon with just a 0.4p royalty” argument, what are the actual facts? What can we, the starving-artist DIY sector put our faith in? If a company’s finances are a mystery and the major labels are making shady deals and the future looks bleakly uncertain then trust something real – the audience.

I know I go on about this a lot but, really, Talk To Them. Don’t just trust some article in Music Week that says “everyone’s on Spotify these days…” ask your audience what services they use and what they want from you. Then work out a strategy from there. You know where to find these people, they’re not hidden like Spotify’s account books, they’re the ones who make that reassuring clapping sound when you finish playing a song (and if there’s no one doing that yet then it’s a bit premature to be worrying about Spotify royalties). Why have the streaming argument with faceless trolls in the comment section of the online Guardian when you can have it with the people who are already part of your work? You think Spotify is a good discovery platform for new artists? Well it’s nothing compared to actual humans talking to each other. I was chatting to an audience member after a gig recently and asked her how she’d discovered us and she told me a policeman had recommended one of our songs while she was waiting to make a statement – stick that in your algorithm and smoke it!

Sure you can withdraw your music from these services (my friend Steve Lawson did that in 2011 and outlined his reasons with charm and eloquence on his website) but whatever distribution tools you favour remember the most important thing is to engage with the listener rather than the platform. If anything is the future, it’s that. The modern music industries are built on networks. Networks are built on relationships. Don’t just wait for a fresh format and then moan when the new boss turns out to be the same as the old boss… you’re an artist, be creative.

Maybe the music business as we know it simply isn’t going to be saved. Maybe it’ll just continue to scrabble around in a purgatory of Kickstarter myths, desperate hat-passing and grim talent competitions. Maybe Spotify is just another way of making fat cats fatter. Well, it’s not like musicians aren’t used to that.

Yes, we opened Pandora’s Box. Yes, out flew all manner of catastrophes. Perhaps it was preventable. Perhaps there was another direction we could have taken. Perhaps we narrowly missed a new Eden. Unfortunately we all know that once these problems are out, they don’t go back in.

But we also know what the last thing to emerge from Pandora’s Box was…

I’ve been reading quite a few musicians’ memoirs recently. Music documentaries too. I’m not fussy about the genres or eras, I enjoyed the one about Ace Of Spades just as much as the doc about Trad Jazz in the 50s. Band politics tend to be the same regardless of fashion.

I’m not sure where this new, almost academic bent has emerged from. One could argue that a musician spending his downtime pouring over the in-fighting of past masters is distinctly unhealthy. But I say: forewarned is forearmed. Most bands suffer grizzly endings full of regrets and loose ends. I don’t want the band I’m in to go the same way and yet I am aware that it’s a distinct possibility. Essentially a band is a confusing hybrid of gang and marriage – the potential for disagreement and calamity is near limitless. Still, I have hope.

Morbidity aside, read any rock autobiography from the last century and you will find one single unifying factor, one simple point that unites these various partisan reminiscences. One great omission. One conspicuous absence.

The audience.

Memories are crystal clear when it comes to itemizing the drug cocktails and tour bus breakdowns, famous cross-overs and favoured studio tech-specs, but no one ever seems to have a clue who is actually buying the records. “This one sold half a million units but this one only sold two hundred thousand and now the label is getting fidgety…”

Who makes up these great hoards (or herds)? What is this faceless consumer hive? Dear Narrator, why are you not curious?

One of the things I find amusing about music conferences is just how many “industry people” loathe being subjected to music. Lured in by a free bar they flinch at the strains of some poor band soundtracking the scrum of label execs squirming over the buffet like piglets at the teet.

But I suppose it is with good reason. These days everyone receives such an endless avalanche of artist spam that the sound of a guitar tuning up is enough to have us diving for cover, so terrified are we of appearing encouraging, that we may inadvertently add to our already bursting spam folder. The majority of us are in no position to deal out music careers anyway. Advice? Sure. A favour? Perhaps. A big break? I don’t even know what that is, I’m just here for the vol-au-vents.

I spent last week at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. It was my first time. I was scheduled to speak at Primavera Pro on the subject of independent touring (particularly along the usual theme of sustainability) but I ended up being drafted in to fill vacancies on the “Politics & Music: An Uneasy Alliance” and “How To Build A Dream Festival” panels as well (which really cut into the time I’d specifically set aside to eat miniature quiches and ignore bands).

I had a great time – met some fascinating people and watched a bunch of amazing world-class acts. It’s a wonderful festival. So different from its UK counterparts. The sunshine and surroundings mean that all the pundits and posers are a lot more relaxed, there doesn’t seem to be as much to prove, the hierarchies aren’t as pronounced. It’s as though everyone is on holiday together. I had fun. We all had fun. And the really interesting thing is that we all seemed to be surprised that we were having fun.

One day stands out in particular.

It was the first day of the conference. I’d already been in town for twenty four hours and met a lot of characters (some quietly interesting, others relentlessly irritating – the lines would come to blur beautifully as the week progressed). The group I was knocking about with consisted of Malcolm Haynes from Glastonbury Festival, Mark Jones from Wall Of Sound, Pete Shelley from The Buzzcocks, Felipe Altenfelder from Fora do Eixo, Steve Knightely from Show Of Hands and my colleagues at Un-Convention. Martin Atkins (author and ex-drummer of PiL, Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke) would later join our gang. I know I know, the whole thing sounds like an Enid Blyton book but with added mojitos.

I’d been busy wearing my serious face all day. No mean feat. Sipping mineral water between John McClure and Pete Shelley on a stage in front of an international audience discussing political songwriting whilst watching the translators’ exasperated expressions in response to the onslaught of accents, slang and questionable annunciation is a surreal experience to say the least. By the end of the afternoon it was time to take off our pundit hats and let down what hair we have left.

Un-Convention had organized a semi-secret gig at a gloriously dingy basement club called Sidecar. Carl Barât from The Libertines was supposed to be playing but called in sick so I got asked to fill in at the last minute. The audience (made up of a mixture of locals and conference tourists) were a lot of fun and didn’t seem to mind that a balding moustachioed dog-enthusiast had replaced the messiah-shaped wan heroin chic of Barât.

My set, however, was but an aperitif. The main event was Shelley and Atkins. These two men are absolute legends. Punk pioneers. Influential is too impoverished a word for them. With only one rushed rehearsal (more of a musical handshake) they formed a power duo that put all the young pretenders to shame. I’m not much of a mosher, or one for stage invasions, but their performance made me do both.

Beyond the visceral pleasure of such a sonic onslaught there were three things that gave me particular joy. The first was seeing Pete Shelley play Buzzcocks songs in a small venue. I’ve seen plenty of the original punk bands playing the nostalgia circuit (main stages at mid-size festivals etc) but to dance along to “Ever Fallen In Love” in a dimly lit cavern-like venue with a sticky floor and an ever-so-subtle suggestion of faeces wafting over from the toilets was pretty special, almost how I imagine it was the first time round (Pete can still muster a pretty convincing sneer!). The second joy was the transformation that took place in all of us. A few hours earlier we’d been wearing translation earpieces and waffling on about grim things like brand awareness – now we were jumping up and down, dripping with sweat (not just our own), being the people that, for much of the time, we keep hidden deep within. It’s not that one persona is more real than another but, damn, one of them is certainly more fun. The third joy was seeing Martin Atkins rocking out on the drums and then turning into a complete fan-boy afterwards. Previously I’d only known him as a sort of professional cynic, a sage fool almost, urging artists to empty their heads of all that spurious rock and roll mythology: “Welcome to the music industry… You’re F**ked!” he’d shout. But now he was mooning over his newly acquired Pete Shelley plectrum and gleefully pocketing his signed setlist before sitting up all night editing together the grainy gig footage on his laptop in a hotel full of scowling celebrities. See, we’re all in the same big chain of people who derive an incalculable jouissance from music – doesn’t matter how respectable we become.

Nothing at Primavera topped that night for me. It was just so wonderful to enjoy music without measuring it. Must do it again some time.

Well, I read enough of it to make me roll my eyes before searching for something more relevant to look at.

I mean, seriously?
Are we still talking about this stuff? About clamping even sturdier chastity belts onto our art so no one can compromise/exploit/devalue it? I thought all the pirates had lost interest in music now that the idea of owning it has become so passé. Why bother with torrent sites when everything is available to stream? If you’re going to battle anyone then battle the people who fixed the royalty rates so low. The pirates are now moored elsewhere (the illegal ones anyway).

But then, in the creative sector at least, no one is on the same page. We aren’t even all reading from the same book. We all just move at our own individual pace towards the corners of the industry that shelter our preferred line of bogeymen. The internet has put an end to the shared linear narrative (and with it any credible universal nemesis); where there was once a single path there is now a spaghetti junction of possibilities. The music business (to paraphrase an old saying) has become an octopus whose outermost left tentacle doesn’t know what the seven tentacles to the right of it are doing.

A couple of months ago I was asked to write an opinion piece for NARC magazine. The brief simply stated that it could be about anything music-related. As usual I left it until the midnight before deadline day (a bad habit I picked up at school and still haven’t shifted) and, as is often the case after a few glasses of wine, what came out was a BIG RANT. Indeed, this could be the rantiest thing I’ve written in a long time. Anyway, they’re on their next issue now so I’ve stuck it up in the articles section of this website to keep the rant alive.

The great Rock & Roll ego is one of the enduring cliches of modern music. From band members travelling in separate limousines to singers refusing to go onstage because they’ve been given the wrong brand of mineral water, it is the greatest obstacle to an audience’s affections (though evidently an infinitely surmountable one).

But what does it really mean to have a rock and roll ego? I’d argue that storming off because the lights are the wrong shade of puce or swearing at fans who want to be close to you are not necessarily examples of arrogance but rather insecurity. The real ego maniac is the one that stands on a stage and mistakes the moment with forever, who believes that what goes up need not necessarily come down. Someone who ignores the great career graveyard of icons past and declares “I am the exception.”

Often it’s not the established acts that manifest this trait, but rather those starting out – the quick success stories who don’t acknowledge that the speedier the climb the more rapid the fall. Also the hopefuls – those that never were nor will be – pushing and pushing and pushing, in the thrall of a misplaced notion that says “if my songs reach millions of people that will be all I need, my life will be sorted/fixed/meaningful… that will be it.”

But what happens afterwards? What will you do when they begin to stack the chairs and sweep away the popped balloons at your big party? I hear the Bee Gees invested their early royalties into cheap housing rented out by agencies (or is that one of those urban myths?). If their stardom had stalled the Gibbs would not have starved. Of course, their souls might’ve.

It’s hard to look at your own career objectively. Only the other day I asked myself a difficult question: Have I already peaked? And if so, how long will it take me to realise? And what will I do next? I’m not sure I’m really the landlord type…